In photolithography steps in a semiconductor device manufacturing process, for example, a resist coating treatment of applying a resist solution onto a substrate to form a resist film, exposure processing of exposing a predetermined pattern on the resist film on the substrate, developing treatment of supplying a developing solution to the substrate for which exposure processing has been performed to develop the resist film and so on are performed to form a predetermined resist pattern on the substrate.
However, to increase the performance of the semiconductor device, it is necessary to advance the miniaturization of the resist pattern. Conventionally, the miniaturization of the resist pattern has been advanced by increasing the exposure resolution in the exposure processing. There is a limit in increasing the resolution performance of exposure apparatus in which exposure processing is performed, and therefore it is difficult to further miniaturize the resist pattern in the future.
Hence, there proposed is, as a method other than the one increasing the resolution performance of exposure apparatus, for example, a method of housing a substrate having a resist pattern formed thereon in a container which stores a solvent material at the bottom portion to expose the substrate to a resist solvent vapor atmosphere. According to this method, since the resist pattern is dissolved with the solvent to flow, for example, the area of a window in the resist pattern can be decreased to miniaturize the resist pattern (for example, Patent Document 1).